


The Persistent Beat

by myrtlebroadbelt



Category: Misfits (TV 2009)
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Memory Loss, Past Brainwashing, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-04
Updated: 2020-02-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:33:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22554871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrtlebroadbelt/pseuds/myrtlebroadbelt
Summary: Kelly isn’t really sure why she takes the iPod.Maybe it’s because the last time she saw him alive, it was all he could focus on, gloved thumb circling through the catalog, taking forever to pick a song. Being a pain in the arse, as usual.Four days Kelly thinks Nathan is dead for good.
Relationships: Kelly Bailey/Nathan Young
Comments: 5
Kudos: 31





	The Persistent Beat

**Author's Note:**

> _If some night I don't come home_  
>  _Please don't think I've left you alone_  
>  \- Arcade Fire, “Keep the Car Running”

Kelly isn’t really sure why she takes the iPod. 

Maybe it’s because the last time she saw him alive, it was all he could focus on, gloved thumb circling through the catalog, taking forever to pick a song. Being a pain in the arse, as usual.

Or maybe she’s just afraid it will slip out of his pocket and crack against the pavement next to the girl in a pencil skirt whose name she doesn’t even know. 

The sirens are getting closer. The crowd has thinned a bit, but there are still a few people milling about, asking each other if they saw what happened, if they remember how they got here, why they’re wearing these clothes.

They’re racking their brains — Kelly can hear it.

Curtis has his hands on her shoulders, trying to keep her back. “Kelly, leave him,” Alisha tells her, but she ignores them both, wiping her face and stepping forward.

She reaches into his jacket with a shaking hand, careful not to look at his eyes. They’re somehow the deadest thing about him — even though he’s got a fucking fence through his chest, and his shirt’s soaked with blood, and none of the voices in her head are his.

(She wonders what day it is.)

The iPod’s still playing when she takes it out. Some Arcade Fire song. Half of her resents that it survived the fall when he didn’t. The other half puts together that if he was listening to music, they didn’t get to him. Too bad she can’t even be relieved about it.

Kelly presses pause and shoves the iPod into her pocket just as the ambulance arrives. 

The police usher them into the community centre to ask what they saw. The only problem is that they didn’t see anything, and they can’t exactly say a girl with superpowers brainwashed them into doing things they don’t remember.

They try their best not to sound suspicious. It doesn’t seem to be going well, based on what Kelly can hear the cop thinking, but it’s apparently not enough to get them in trouble. At least not yet.

(If Nathan were here, he’d open his big mouth and probably get them all arrested. But if he were here, they wouldn’t be talking to the police in the first place, would they?)

She keeps getting distracted, her eyes traveling up to the mezzanine. At one point, the cop asks them another question, and Alisha has to pinch her arm through her cardigan to get her attention. She wonders where Simon is, then realizes he might be here and they wouldn’t even know it.

It’s only when another cop walks in and she hears flashes of thoughts ( _water pistol, blocked door_ ) that it hits her — Nathan died trying to save them.

God, what an idiot.

She can’t believe she has to walk home in these clothes. She’s desperate for a smoke, too, but the Virtue version of herself must have tossed out her cigarettes.

Curtis and Alisha offer to walk with her, but she turns them down. If she overhears anything between here and her flat, let it be the usual petty shit from strangers wrapped up in their own problems. 

(They’re surprised by how hard she’s taking it. They’re not the only ones.)

The walk is a blur of concrete, and before she knows it, she’s putting her key in the door and stepping inside. Her mum isn’t home, which is weird — she works nights, and it’s barely noon.

It must be Thursday, Kelly realizes. She does the shopping on Thursdays.

When she opens the door to her bedroom, she thinks she must be in the wrong flat. The room is cleaner than it’s ever been, and her clothes are in bin bags at the foot of her bed. 

Looking around, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She expects to see black tear tracks down her cheeks and dark smudges under her eyes, because that’s what she looks like when she’s been crying. Instead, she’s just as unrecognizable as the room she’s standing in.

(It makes her feel like none of this is real. It’s all just a film, or a dream, or a really shitty practical joke.)

Kelly grabs a shirt and tracksuit bottoms from one of the bags and leaves the rest. Before getting changed, she takes the iPod out of her pocket and places it carefully on her dressing table.

Her mum returns later to find her rummaging through the kitchen bin for her earrings. And her eyeliner. And various other items she apparently took it upon herself to throw away yesterday.

This is worse than a hangover.

“Kel? What are you doing back so early?”

Kelly straightens up and watches her mum put down the shopping bags. She moves to help her unpack them, hoping that if she gives herself something to focus on, it will keep the quiver out of her voice when she says she felt sick, or the probation worker sent them home early, or —

Whatever excuse she was going to use, it doesn’t make it out. The carton of milk she’s holding lands on the worktop with a thud, and she hears the sob escape her mouth before she even feels the tears come. 

She hates this — hates people seeing her like this. She means to hurry away into her bedroom and shut the door, but she ends up leaking snot onto her mum’s shoulder instead.

“I don’t want him to die,” Kelly chokes out, because she still can’t talk about it like it really happened. Not when she saw him alive in a hoodie and dead in a suit, with hardly more than a blink in between.

She wakes up in the middle of the night from a dream that feels more like a memory, but it fades almost as soon as she opens her eyes.

There’s something warm and damp on her cheek. She reaches up to wipe it away, thinking she must be crying, but her hand comes away dry. By the time she falls asleep again, she’s forgotten about it.

In the morning, she sleeps in. The probation worker hasn’t shown up for days now anyway. And if anyone expects her to pick up litter or wash windows right now, they can fuck off.

Eventually, she’s woken by a call from a number she doesn’t know. She thinks about ignoring it and going back to sleep, but something tells her she should pick up.

She might be even more psychic than she realizes.

“Yeah?” she answers, a bit hoarsely.

“Hello, am I speaking to Kelly?” asks an unfamiliar voice in a familiar accent.

She sits up. “Who’s this?”

“This is Nathan’s mum.”

Kelly swallows on a dry throat. Her mouth starts to form about a hundred words at once, only she can’t decide which is the right one to start with.

Mrs. Young breaks the silence. “Do you know about …”

“Yeah,” Kelly says quickly, to spare them both. “I know.”

“I’ve got his phone,” Mrs. Young explains, her voice somehow thick and brittle at the same time. “You’re the last person he called.”

“Oh.”

Kelly remembers Alisha dragging her across the floor, Curtis kicking open the door, how _wrong_ they both seemed. She hates to think that she might have spoken to him when she wasn’t herself — that he died with that version of her in his head.

“You and Nathan were friends, then?” Mrs. Young asks.

“Um,” Kelly says. “Yeah.”

They were. Of course they were. She wouldn’t feel like this if they hadn’t been. Wouldn’t have cooked him chicken nuggets and smiled at his stupid jokes. Wouldn’t have told him to run when she knew she was a goner.

If she hesitates to call him a friend, it’s not because she thought of him as less than one.

Maybe Mrs. Young can read minds too, or maybe it’s a mother’s intuition, or maybe Kelly’s just really bloody obvious, because she starts to ask, “Were you two —”

“No,” Kelly interrupts. She doesn’t want to hear those words either.

Mrs. Young doesn’t press it any further. “I was wondering if you could tell me …”

She pauses, going so quiet that for a second Kelly wonders if they’ve lost the connection. Then she starts over.

“The police found some of Nathan’s things near the community centre. I don’t know …” She trails off again, lets out a breath. “He said he got a flat with friends, but I didn’t ...”

(Fuck’s sake, Nathan.)

“Do you know where he was living?” Mrs. Young asks at last, like it’s all she can get out.

Maybe her intuition isn’t so good after all. Kelly can imagine a million reasons to kick Nathan out. But you don’t have to be a fucking rocket scientist to see that he didn’t have the money for a flat — or, she suspects, the friends to share it with.

“No,” Kelly says. “I don’t know.”

She tells herself she’s doing it for Mrs. Young, that it wouldn’t do any good to upset her now that nothing can be done about it. But really, she’s doing it for him. Because she knows it’s what he would have wanted.

It scares her how sure she is, how well she came to know him in only a handful of weeks. 

The funeral is tomorrow, Nathan’s mum says. She asks Kelly to invite anyone who might want to be there. Kelly scribbles the details on the back of the university prospectus she hasn’t gotten around to throwing out.

“Thank you, Kelly,” says Mrs. Young, and even though Kelly’s power doesn’t work over the phone, she still knows that the woman on the other line will break down crying as soon as the call ends.

(Kelly won’t. She can hardly believe it.)

It’s only after she hangs up that she realizes she never said sorry. That’s what you’re supposed to say when someone dies. Or rather, it’s what you say when a person loses someone. In that case, Kelly doesn’t know if she should be saying it or hearing it.

She feels like she lost him, but then she feels like she doesn’t deserve to think of it that way. Like she hasn’t earned it, didn’t know him long enough or care about him in the right way. How could she ever think she’s on the same side of sorry as Nathan’s mum?

She should have said it, she decides. But it’s too late now. It’s too late for a lot of things.

Kelly calls the others, recites the information, tells them she’s okay when they ask. Then she gets out of bed and searches through the bin bags for something black.

The next day, she gives the iPod back.

She didn’t charge it, doesn’t have the right cord. She stupidly feels bad about it, as if he’s going to use it six feet under. It’s the same reason she’s left it untouched on her dressing table since she brought it home.

(She might as well keep _something_ from dying.)

Her finger brushes his palm when she places it in his hand. She can’t believe how cold it is, compared to how warm it felt when he grabbed her wrist in the community centre office, as everything was only just starting to go to shit.

Afterward, she sits in the pew and notices how quiet it is — it shouldn’t be, when Nathan’s there. The thought almost makes her laugh. Almost.

It’s nothing new to her, not laughing. She likes to think she was pretty good at it, most of the time. Because he was a dickhead. Most of the time. And she didn’t want to give him (or that annoying little voice in the back of her head that said _but_ _you like him_ ) the satisfaction.

She really shouldn’t have. Liked him, that is. But then again, Kelly’s always been drawn to sparkly shit, as the engagement ring still rattling around in her locker can attest.

That night, she watches Simon’s DVD more times than she can count. Some of the moments she recognizes, but she finds herself lingering on the unfamiliar ones. 

(Wet hair, waving a racquet, screaming in a shopping trolley.) 

It feels a little bit like he’s been resurrected, getting to hear him say something she’s never heard him say before, see a face she’s never quite seen him make. 

And this time, she lets herself laugh.

On Sunday, she goes out.

She sits smoking on a bench and eavesdrops on everyone who walks past. Listening to other people’s thoughts offers her a welcome break from her own. 

Thoughts like, maybe Curtis did rewind time, and they just don’t know it. 

Simon shared a theory once about alternate dimensions or timelines or something. The rest of them had responded like they usually did when he said weird shit — a dickish comment from Nathan, bracketed by awkward silence.

Now, she’s starting to wonder if maybe there’s another place where it never happened, another Kelly who never saw it. Just like there’s another one lying dead in the community centre, and another one sitting in prison, and who knows how many more.

Everything is so fucked up.

Monday comes, and she decides she can’t get away with skipping two days in a row.

She’s so used to him being there when she shows up — smoking outside or beating his breakfast out of the vending machine. He was a fixture, like the notice boards and the foosball table and the stacks of chairs upon chairs. She can hardly think of a time when she was here and he wasn’t.

She gets changed and fixes her hair in the mirror. But even as she smooths it out, her eyes aren’t on her reflection. His locker is ajar, and she opens it without thinking, and there’s his jumpsuit, smiling at her, like it’s waiting for him. Like it doesn’t know.

This, right now, feels like more of a goodbye than anything. Something tells her that once she closes his locker, it’ll be real. 

There's no bright side to any of this, but if she had to find one that was a little less dark than the others — at least now she can tell herself it might've worked out. It's always easier to be hopeful about something that can never happen.

She closes the locker.

A few minutes later, she gets a paper plane in the eye.

Lucky for Nathan, they have some grave-digging experience.

As the four of them shovel and pant and heave, Kelly strains to listen, even though she knows she doesn’t have to — she could hear Simon’s soft-spoken thoughts as clear as day over the club’s music, as well as she could hear her own.

But there’s nothing now, even when they open the coffin and stare down at him. She’s almost ready to believe Alisha’s suggestion that she imagined it, when it happens.

As sure as she was that she heard him, she didn’t exactly think this far ahead.

The headphones she put in his hand have moved to his neck, and his voice isn’t just in her head anymore, and the feeling in her chest that was there when he walked her home, and smiled at her on the sofa, and thought about her on the mezzanine — but didn’t properly grab her attention until she saw him on that fence and decided he _wasn’t allowed to die_ — doesn’t disappear when she looks at him now.

He’s here, and he’s alive, and he’s immortal, and all Kelly can think is:

_Oh, fuck._

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from “Such Great Heights,” because how could it not be?


End file.
